Prometheus of the Revolution: Rural Teachers in Republican China
The development of modern education beginning in the late nineteenth century created a new type of educator—the public school teacher—in rural China. This article examines why rural school teachers turned out to be the vanguard of the Chinese communist revolution in the countryside. Most rural teachers, it shows, were young men in their twenties from [...]
Read moreReification of the Chinese Intellectual: On the Origins of the CCP Concept of Zhishifenzi
Research has largely overlooked the reification of the intellectual (zhishifenzi) after the 1949 Communist revolution. Studying this major feature of Chinese socialism can illuminate the workings of the Chinese Communist Party, state-society relations, and the experience of so-called intellectuals. This article explores the social and ideological contexts that first nurtured the party’s concept of intellectuals. [...]
Read moreA Linguistic Enclave: Translation and Language Policies in the Early People’s Republic of China
After 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made great efforts to control the Chinese language—the way people write, speak, and think. Especially during the Mao years, linguistic conformity was one of the chief means through which the CCP tried to make the articulation of dissent all but impossible. As this article shows, however, the party’s [...]
Read moreOpium in the City: A Spatial Study of Guangzhou’s Opium Houses, 1923–1936
The article examines the insertion of opium houses at different levels of the urban space of Guangzhou—from the largest to the smallest: the areas of Honam and Hopei, the districts, the streets—during the years 1923 to 1936. The distribution of dens changed mainly due to shifts in the strategy of the authorities, who paid special [...]
Read moreA Cage of Voices: Producing and Doing Dagongmei in Contemporary China
“I have a stomach full of words, but I just can’t say them” is a statement often uttered by migrant women in contemporary China. Using this as a point of entry, this article explores the paradoxical role that the Dagongmei’s Home, a Beijing women’s organization that promotes the rights and interests of female migrants, plays [...]
Read moreIntroduction to "Whither Chinese Reforms? Dialogues Among Western and Chinese Scholars, II"
The Parallel Partial Progression (PPP) Approach to Institutional Transformation in Transition Economies: Optimize Economic Coherence, Not Policy Sequence
Many economists have attributed China’s high growth to the implementation of the correct sequence of reforms. The authors reject this interpretation because it does not characterize the reform process correctly; it does not recognize adequately the interaction among reforms that sustains the progress of each individual reform; and optimal sequences exist only when the policy [...]
Read moreAdapting by Learning: The Evolution of China’s Rural Health Care Financing
Adaptive capacity is essential for any human social system, because human societies are full of unique circumstances, genuine uncertainty, novel complexity, structural instabilities, and conflicts of values and interests, and, more important, the environment under which the systems exist is always changing, while everyone, including policy makers and policy experts, operates under conditions of “bounded [...]
Read moreChina’s Neglected Informal Economy: Reality and Theory
The informal economy—defined as workers who have no security of employment, receive few or no benefits, and are often unprotected by labor laws—in China today accounts for 168 million of the 283 million urban employed, but the official statistical apparatus in China still does not gather systematic data on the informal economy. Part of the [...]
Read moreOut of the Darkness: Chinese Transition Paths
China’s rapid economic growth since 1978 has occurred precisely because it has not followed the strategy of parallel partial progression and financial liberalization advocated by Fan and Woo. However, China missed an historic opportunity to build welfare capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, choosing instead to dismantle its rural health care and educational systems and—as [...]
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